Is half a season enough to make conclusive judgments about the future of a player's career? Definitely not, but it's enough to say something, especially when we combine it with their prospect reports. I'll be asking Shelley Ford straight about a whole bunch of exciting rookies on the Road toire Fantasy Baseball podcast.

Welcome, everybody, to the Sunday edition of the Roto Wire Fantasy Baseball podcast brought to you by Pick 6. My guest today, Shelley Verstrait of the Fantasy Feud podcast, Shelley, thanks for joining me.

How's it going? Hey, Eric. It's going pretty good. It's, you know, baseball is about to get started on this

Sunday afternoon, and yeah, it's almost the Fourth of July, which is pretty cool, Sunday afternoon. And yeah, it's almost the 4th of July,

which is pretty cool too. So yeah, it's going pretty good. Yeah, peak baseball season in a way

when everything else has stopped and it's just us for a little bit, but also heading into the

dog days of summer, interesting combo there. But our main topic for the day,

we will be looking at a whole bunch of rookies and asking questions like, hey, were they

supposed to be this good? Or wait, weren't they supposed to be better than this? Because,

Shelley, you have spent many years covering prospects. And one thing that I always want to talk to prospect people about is these rookies because

you all have a longer sense for what these players have looked like over multiple seasons.

The rest of us, we're aware of these prospects, but mostly we rely on you all and then we

see the major league numbers.

And so getting the chance to combine 80 games worth of data with several years' worth of minor league knowledge.

I'm excited to see where we go with that.

But first, we've got some headlines to deal with.

Starting in Cleveland, where we have a shakeup in the rotation, Gavin Williams,

back from injury. He was on the 60-day-L with elbow issues, and it's Tristan McKenzie, who has been sent down. Really a tough year, multiple years for Tristan McKenzie, and man, his star has fallen pretty far.

Optimism for his future has got to be hard to find.

Yeah, I mean, like the last two years have been atrocious, like over five ERA and over a 1.5 whip.

Like that is unacceptable if, you know know real life and especially in fantasy.

Honestly, I didn't expect Tristan McKenzie to be this bad again. I have him in a couple places.

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